Technical Abstract:
Annual planting of wheat for use as a cool-season forage is a common practice in the Southern Plains of Oklahoma. A perennial cool-season forage grass could serve as a cost effective, environmentally friendly, sustainable alternative to annual wheat planting. The goal of this breeding program is to develop new forage-type bluegrass cultivars adapted to the Southern Plains region of Oklahoma. Local germplasm collections of Texas bluegrass (Poa arachnifera) along with GRIN germplasm acquisition of Canadian (P. compressa), Kentucky (P. pratensis), Argentine (P. ligularis), and Sandberg (P. secunda) bluegrass were used to establish an evaluation nursery. Breeding approaches include recurrent selection within Texas bluegrass and interspecific hybridization. The dioecious nature of Texas bluegrass is being exploited to try and create apomictic hybrids with the other Poa species. Populations and hybrids will be evaluated for forage and turf qualities. Preliminary results indicate that Argentine bluegrass is dioecious and can be crossed with Texas bluegrass to produce fertile F1 progeny. Preliminary results also indicate that cross taxa polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of simple sequence repeat (SSR) DNA markers derived from sorghum may be a source of polymorphic markers for use in marker assisted selection.